He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.

A friend is a person who goes around saying nice things about you behind your back.

Every individual strives to grow and exclude, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature.

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say; even though we may repeat the words ever so often.